2014 In Review: Thoughts and Statistics

Although this blog had only being around the later part of 2014, I feel much has happened for it to justify a review. What started out as a pet project during my sabbatical leave, had become something important to me.

(If you want to skip the thoughts, jump straight to the statistics below)

It started out with a personal note on why I'm blogging. Not long after that, I began to write articles, mostly technical, that are close to my heart.

I was very lucky to have my first technical article, 5 Array Methods That You Should Be Using Now, picked up by Christian Heilmann via his tweet.

@codepo8 Hey, thanks for the tweet, meant alot to me! Can know which demos are "dense" so I could update them?
— Colin Toh (@p0larBoy) October 1, 2014

To be able to have a few quick exchanges with someone I'm in awe with was particularly mind-blowing for me. The article was then promptly picked up Peter Cooper in his wildy popular newsletter, Javascript Weekly. My ES6 article also made it to the following week's issue.

My most popular article so far will be the The Anti-hero of CSS Layout - "display:table". It got picked up by Smashing Magazine and Hacker News. I was totally floored by the responses because the topic was somewhat offbeat. (display:flex is the new rave)

Yes, there is *so* much you can achieve with display: table. A pretty good article on a pretty old CSS property. http://t.co/AKew1WQ7eg
— Smashing Magazine (@smashingmag) October 27, 2014

Of course, it's not all rainbows and unicorns. I learnt to not write click-bait title like, Avoid OOP, and to keep my writing tone direct.

Colin Toh

Admittedly, I'm not a good writer and my command of english is not something I'm proud of. I spent a lot of time crafting and proof-reading the articles. Of course, I had a lot of help from friends and readers who are much better at this than me.

All in all, 2014 was pretty sweet. I will continue to learn to write better and read more. Hopefully my articles will be able to help out more people in some ways or another.

To a more kick-ass 2015!